The Trans Formation From ‘image’ To Pictorial Language

The proliferation of images as an important driving force made painting face a crisis of survival,but in the late 1990 s,when contemporary art was occupied by multimedia digital art,installation art and other avant-garde art,a group of easel painting artists broke through the shackles,they did not reject images,but used ready-made images in life as materials to create,explored the meaning behind images,explored more possibilities of painting,and gave painting a new lease of life.They explored the possibilities of painting and gave new life to the art of drawing,marking the return of easel painting.Luc Tuymans is one of the most iconic of these artists.Few artists have been able to draw on historical culture and readily available images such as those from i Phone photos and You Tube videos with such sensitivity,dealing with all aspects of global culture from history to contemporary times,including the philosophical questions of time,memory and image that are at the heart of Tuymans’ painting practice.His restrained images conceal a profound moral complexity to touch on the realities of our world.This paper is a study of Tuymans’ transformation from image to pictorial language,taking him as an example,and innovatively divides his transformation from image to pictorial language into three steps: the material gathering stage-the selection of Tuymans’ ’images’;the practice stage--The final presentation of the picture-the presentation of the image in the picture.Through the analysis of a large number of examples and summaries,it is concluded that it is through the creation of a sense of distance that Tuymans distances himself from the reference image and realises the purpose of the thematic metaphor of the picture.It is hoped that this study of Tuymans’ "image" painting will provide more theoretical and practical references for the author’s future creation,and also provide some reference value for the exploration of contemporary painting in China.